Archive for ‘LGBTIAQQLOLWTF’

Last year, I sent the following directly to Lisa Vogel as well as posting it to the MichFest and Facebook Womyn MichFest boards. I got loads of supportive responses from individual women, but nothing from Lisa, unless you count the shutting down of any discussion of this issue on the “official” MichFest boards as a sort of response. Or the blind eye that the she and the other organizers seem willing to turn toward Scout and other long-time Festies who have gotten caught up in the whole trans* delusion. As much as I hate to admit it, MichFest no longer feels like safe space to me.

As is often the case with misogynists and anti-feminists, the trans horde that took advantage of the “inclusivity” (read: a transwoman helped organize the march, and woe be unto anyone who crosses men who demand access to woman-only space in general) of NYC Dyke March — and others who weren’t even there — don’t seem to have read a word of anything Sheila Jeffreys has actually written. If they had read her, how could it have rationally been said that Jeffreys — a pro-female, pro-lesbian writer — and her work had no place at a lesbian-centered event?

Or, perhaps they read a couple of words, saw something they didn’t like, and threw away the rest? “The rest” being Sheila Jeffreys’s entire life’s work of pro-female, pro-lesbian, PIV-critical radical feminist analysis which spans decades and examines women’s lives from pre-WWI — a body of work from which modern women can draw many parallels, recognize obvious patterns in how women are oppressed by men over time, and call age-old bullshit when we see it, because we are never, ever allowed to see it. Women’s history is routinely erased, and this is a deliberate political strategy to keep women as ignorant of patriarchal context and as oppressed — and as complicit in our own oppression — as possible.

Something has gotten lost on the way to liberation for the GLBT community – females. Females have been the backbone of the movement, with lesbians playing key roles in the 1980s fighting the “Gay Plague” of their gay male brothers, working to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and fighting for anti-discrimination protections at the state and national level. Lesbians deserve a pat on the back for their contributions, and the gratitude of their GBT brethren.

Lesbians also deserve recognition with regard to state legislation that has been advanced in the last 15 years by GLBT civil rights organizations, most notably the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, to ban discrimination based on “gender identity.” “Gender identity” sounds like a great concept; and one that – you would think – lesbians should embrace, as lesbians know full well the harm caused by sex stereotyping. But the gender identity legislation presents two fundamental problems for all females, and for lesbians in particular.

Recently, male-to-female transgender Joelle Ruby Ryan pointed out how well organized, well-supported and well-attended the 11th annual Philadelphia Trans-Health Conference (PTHC) was expected to be, and contrasted that to the relatively tiny and unsupported Radfem 2012 conference which has had to relocate after trans* activists successfully lobbied for its booking to be canceled by London’s Conway Hall.

The latest slogan of the trans activists is ‘my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bull shit’. The current trans obsession with intersectionality is a major cause for concern, and a trans co-option of intersectional theory could have disastrous consequences for the political struggles of all subordinate groups.

Trans activists are co-opting political movements and the ultimate trans agenda is to remove the rights of all subordinate groups to self-determination and movements for liberation. I do not believe that most individuals who identify as trans or their allies are consciously planning the depoliticisation of class based oppressions. Trans is a structural and colonising tactic – a tool of the patriarchy, but if you buy into trans theory, that is what you are buying into.

Hope you are well. I am writing to ask the National Center for Transgender Equality to weigh in on a controversy that has pitted Lesbians, many of whom have been “good” allies to the Transgender community, and Transgender women. I am sure you have heard of it – the “Cotton Ceiling,” a term porn actress Drew DeVeaux and other Transgender women use to “challenge lesbians’ tendency to support Transgender causes generally but draw the line at sleeping with Transgender women or including Transgender lesbians in their sexual communities.”

There is an over-emphasis on discourse and domination of ‘language’ in postmodern feminist works; this frequently fails to address the central issue of structural male domination over women. There is validity in linking language with power. However, radical feminists have explained where the ‘master narrative’ lies; it is not in women’s accounts of their life experiences. The voices of the oppressed ought not to be deconstructed. It is men who have privilege and the power of naming in a patriarchy (Daly, 1979; Dworkin, 1979), and men like Foucault or Derrida are no exception.

Structural male dominance should adequately be addressed; but Jane Flax (in Thinking Fragments; 1990), for example, would rather use the terms ‘gender’ and ‘gender relations’ than male dominance. She makes the absurd claim that there is a need to find what gender relations ‘really are’, while gender continues to be constructed and enforced by a male-supremacist context. She remains obscure on the reality of sex hierarchy in a gendered society where men dominate women. There is notable reluctance, in Flax’s work, to seriously name the agent for women’s oppression, i.e. men.

Around the time of the discovery of the AIDS virus in the very early 1980s, the Gay (and Lesbian) community adopted the ideology of homosexuality as innate; Gay (and Lesbian) people were born this way ergo they could not be “fixed”, it wasn’t their “fault” and AIDS could not be a punishment from God if the theist belief of being “made in His image“ were to hold.

It was politically expedient at the time, and quite intuitive really, to claim a biological basis for homosexuality when the AIDS pandemic itself was, and continues to be, a biological disaster. An innate homosexuality also allowed people close to Gays (and Lesbians), especially mothers, to absolve themselves of any *wrong doing* and instead build a platform from which they could advocate for their children, fathers (and mothers), brothers (and sisters), husbands (and wives) as full human beings with full human/medical rights.

Poststructuralism, also referred to as postmodernism (1), has been majorly influential on recent feminist theory, especially within the context of Academia. This is an analysis and a critical assessment of postmodern ‘feminism’ from my own radical lesbian feminist standpoint. I will first highlight some key issues coming from the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970’s (i.e. background on feminism, as it looked like before postmodernism). I will then look at the academic feminist theoretical postmodernist turn of recent years, and later point out to Queer culture as an offshoot of postmodernism. I will also explain why postmodernism is seriously antithetical to the goal to eradicate the oppression of women, and conclude with hope for resistance. This essay is also the result of a research into postmodern feminism that I had been doing for University. Here, I analyse some postmodern ‘feminist’ works.